Dear Walt,
A response to your letter, albeit only briefly as it is late here on a Friday but I have only just seen this. I would have left it as a comment but it didn’t seem to work when I did so.
It has never been my intention to claim “that OA just wasn’t happening in the humanities until [I] came along”. If this is the impression that I gave, then I apologise for it.
I would like to make a number of points about the article in question, though, and my practice of crediting others.
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This piece credits the work of others throughout in detailing the contemporary scene. Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Nicky Agate’s Humanities Commons; the recent AAU-ARL-AAUP initiative; work funded by Mellon; Open Book Publishers; Open Humanities Press; Eileen Joy and Punctum Books; Knowledge Unlatched. There is just one paragraph on OLH. It is not possible, in a piece with as tight a word limit as this, to cover everything.
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In almost every longer talk I have given over the last few years years I have spent quite some time talking about humanists’ involvement in the BBB declarations (as I mention in this piece also, noting Suber’s and Guedon’s participation). I also note (and usually list) a range of scholar-OA publications. I myself have published in such venues (Neo-Victorian Studies, for example). I have never meant to demean or downplay this work.
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I have never made the claim that OA wasn’t happening before me. (So far as I am aware, I have never made a statement that I would hope would even imply this. I would be embarrassed to do so and I am mortified that you think that I would do so on purpose.) I made the claim that a move towards OA has been slower in the humanities disciplines (on aggregate) than in many natural sciences. This doesn’t seem too controversial a statement and it is backed up, at least in conversation and at OA events etc., by others I meet (Suber seemed to confirm this view in his pieces about OA and the humanities). But, then, I also value your statistical approach here and it could be that my experience of actually encountering paywalls has yielded me a false subjective impression. I will look into this.
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I have actually given talks on behalf of other OA organisations in order to promote their work. For instance, at their request, I spoke on behalf Knowledge Unlatched to the International Consortium of Library Consortia a couple of years ago. I am on the advisory boards of many other projects that promote different routes to OA in the humanities.
So, I would like to gently suggest that the reading here is a little harsh on me. You are probably right that a couple of sentences at the least that pointed towards histories of fee-free OA in the humanities – often scholar-led and of extremely high quality – would not have gone amiss. If I were able to revise the piece, I would take that advice on board. I assure you though that a phrase that I repeatedly say in talks that I give is (as near as I can remember): “when humanists have started their own publications, they have often gone OA by default”. (I then usually list Gamut, Foucault Studies, and a raft of other high-quality, fee-free humanistic journals.)
I don’t though think that I oversell my role. At least, I really do not mean to. I’m working on OA. Lots of people are working on OA. Lots of people have worked on OA. I promote OLH because I believe in it as a route. I’ve also put, on record, though, that I don’t believe it is the only way and that we need a series of models side-by-side.
Yours sincerely,
Martin Paul Eve